The Board of Directors of the Foundation will now be elected by the
.NET Foundation membership, and they will be in charge of steering
the direction of the foundation. The Board of Directors will be
elected annually via direct vote from the members of the Foundation,
with just one permanent member from Microsoft.

Anyone contributing to projects in the .NET Foundation can become a
voting member of the Foundation. The main benefit is that you get
to vote for who should represent you in the board of directors. To
become a member, we will judge contributions to the projects in the
foundation, which can either be code contributions, documentation,
evangelism or other activities that advance .NET and its ecosystem.

Membership fee: we are adding a membership fee that will give the
.NET Foundation independence from Microsoft when it comes to how it
chooses to promote .NET and the ecosystem around it. We realize
that not everyone can pay this fee, so this fee can be waived. But
those that contribute to the Foundation will help us fund activities
that will expand .NET.

We intend to have elections every year, so individuals will campaign
on what they intend to bring to the board.

There is a limit in the number of members on the board representing
a single company, which prevents the board from being stacked up by
contributors for a single company, and will encourage our community
to vote for board members with diverse backgrounds, strengthening
the views of the board.

Companies do not vote. The only way to vote is for contributors to
the .NET ecosystem, which could be affiliated with a company to
vote, but the companies themselves have no vote. Our corporate
sponsors are sponsors that care as much as we care as the growth and
health of our ecosystem.

These changes are very close to my heart and took a lot of work to
make them happen and make sure that Microsoft the company was
comfortable with giving up the control over the .NET Foundation.

I want to thank Jon Galloway, the
Executive Director of the current .NET Foundation to help make this a
reality.

Going from the idea to the execution took a long time.
MartinWoodward did some of the early
foot work to get various people at Microsoft comfortable with the
idea. Then Jon took over, and had to continue this process to get
everyone on board and get everyone to accept that our little baby was
ready to graduate, go to college and start its own independent life.

I want to thank my peers in the board of directors that supported this
move, Scott Hunter, Oren
Novotny, Rachel Reese as well as the entire
supporting crew that helped us make this happen, Beth
Massi, Jay Schmelzer and the various heroes in the
Microsoft legal department that crossed all the t’s and dotted all the
i’s.